Still writing!

My apologies – I have not posted on here since my dismal failure at Not-No-Wri-Mo.
BUT
I was stuck at the car dealership on Wednesday, waiting for the diagnosis of a ‘funny squeak’ in my 6 month old car, so I used the five hours to stamp out 1200 words in the Fireballs’n’45’s storyline.

And came up with an idea for a t-shirt… line drawing of a fedora pulled low over a canine muzzle, with the caption “Pitt, Detective. When it’s time to see a dog about a man.”

Pseudo NaNoWriMo – looks like I’m Mister Ten Percent

Ten percent is great when you’re on commission.

Not so good when you’re shooting for 50,000 words and manage 5000 or so in 30 days.

Damn.

On the plus side, I doubled the number of words in my current Minim Opus (see what I did there?)

November 12 and it looks like keeping to the NaNoWriMo suggested word count has me beaten

As at ‘close of play’ last night (11/11) I had about 4500 words done, of an expected 22,000.

Whining aside, it is a fun game to play, and is encouraging me to just write, without bouncing backwards and forwards worrying about stuff, and without sweating the research (at least, not too much – curse you interwebs!).

I’m still trundling along, so lets see how far I get at the end of the month…

Happy writing!

NaNoWriMo approacheth

I’m not signed up for NaNoWriMo, but I’m going to do my best to churn 50K words out.

Starting in eight hours.

Bedtime, here I come!

Not NaNoWriMo

My last post on here was at the end(ish) of July.

I hope nobody was holding their breath for an update!

A couple of my writerly friends and I have decided to use the NaNoWriMo concept to get our collective (water barrels/posteriors… oh what the hay… BUTTS) into gear.

The plan is to write 50K words in the course of the month.

I have the characters, structure, world building and rough outline of the story already done – no flying by the seat of THESE pants.

Still, 2000 words (give or take) a day is going to be fairly intensive. There will be little or no editing done, and what starts as 50K may end up 25K in the cold light of day. We’ll see.

Wish me luck!

I hate mobile phones

At least, mobiles (@Cellphones in the USofA) and what they have done to tension in crime fiction.

Our hero is stumped, she cannot connect that last piece of the puzzle, and if she doesn’t work it out in the next five minutes, the villain will escape.

Problem? Of course not. Phone a bloody friend. Arrange backup, sort out a roadblock, check with the forensic experts, whatever.

That is how it works in the real world, folks.

But the whole idea of thrillers is the THRILL, and that comes from tension. And real tension takes time to develop, it has to fester and bubble and rise like bile in the back of your throat until it stops you thinking about anything but turning the page and when you finally do you realise you haven’t been drawing breath and the resolution lets you BREATHE …

And mobile phones destroy that.

*sigh*

Hello Poland!

WordPress has introduced an interesting little stat-widget that shows where hits on your blog originate from. I’ve got no idea as to the validity of the track-back, but to whoever it was in Poland that looked at my page today, HELLO!

Site tidy up

I have begun a rewrite of No Working Title and so have removed it from view on here. I have also deleted some other pdf material, so if you go to click through and find a dead link, please notify me and I will do my best to sort things out.

 

Happy writing!

Private Eyes, Leggy Dames, Fireballs and Jazz

In between scribbling notes on my current ‘main project’ I have been doing some world building based in the Fantasy Noir genre – think “The Maltese Falcon meets Gandalf”. Or the magnificent works of Jim Butcher.

And the tagline “Private eyes, leggy dames, fireballs and Jazz” seems to sum it up. Oh, and con men, crooked politicians and tommy guns.

 

The Talking Sword – hiatus

I have smashed against a brick wall in my development of the talking sword stories. That wall is an inability to avoid preaching morality when I come to the culminating scene of the current storyline; as a result I have put it to one side to pull out and ponder. The story is still there in the back of my head, but (as they say on Writing Excuses) the voices are just not yammering to have their story told.